Between Me and You Page 7

  “Well my mom always says, ‘If you can dream it, you can be it,’” I say. “So why not dream it?”

  I don’t add: She’s sick again. She called a few days ago and broke the news because she didn’t want to tell me when I was home for Christmas, but she told me not to worry, that it doesn’t look so bad, that they caught it again before it spread too far. She hadn’t betrayed a hint of it for the three days I’d been back; that was all the vacation time I could afford when I could pick up overtime work at the bar and jump-start my bank account for the new year. She looked tired, sure, but she almost always looked tired from her shifts at the hospital, and on Christmas Eve, she and Piper and I curled up on the couch, like we did when Piper and I were little, and watched It’s a Wonderful Life.

  And it never once occurred to me that the insidious seeds of cancer had returned.

  Tonight, on the last night of the year in the span of the millennium, I try to forget that my mom is sick again, that after her call I thought the walls of my tiny student apartment might crater on top of me. But I am an actress: I can pretend to do anything, be anyone. So I compartmentalize my fear and reach for Ben’s hand. I will tell him tomorrow because I know on instinct that I can tell him, and he will find a way to make it a little better. For now, my glove finds his, and it feels right, it feels sturdy, like I’m holding on to something grounding.

  He says: “You’ve always wanted to do this?”

  “Times Square? Oh, my gosh, I grew up watching it with my sister every year!”

  “No.” He laughs. “Acting. Movies, theater, all of that.”

  “Oh, it’s the only thing I really ever felt like I was good at.”

  “Besides bartending.”

  “Besides that, yes, of course.”

  “Because you’re terrible at making bets.”

  “Ugh.” I groan loudly enough to be heard over Caroline and Leo, who are cheering at Boyz II Men, who have just wrapped their set, beamed in on the large screens from Hollywood. “I’m sorry, but that was fixed! Stupid Daisy.”

  He squeezes my hand through our gloves, and I squeeze back, like we have a secret code, like there is an electric pulse running through him into me and back again.

  And now there are only a few minutes until midnight, and the snow is both furious and beautiful, eye-opening and blinding, and we have given in to the excitement of the other thousands of people here, of Dick Clark’s voice over the enormous speakers that surround the block, of the twinkling ball that’s projected across the screens a hundred feet above us.

  “I’m glad you made me come here,” he says, his breath billowing in a plume of white steam. “I’ve lived here all my life, and I’d never have done this without you.”

  “I’m glad that Daisy got the chicken pox,” I reply, and his blue eyes widen then crease into happiness.

  “I’m glad that I didn’t give you my number last year,” he says. “My heart couldn’t have taken it at the time.”

  “I’m glad that I didn’t ransack your heart, and so you’re not dead and that dumb ex-girlfriend didn’t have to revive you with her fancy medical knowledge, and then, either way—dead or alive—you wouldn’t be here with me now.”

  He nods. “I’m glad that I’m here with you now.” He peers toward the sky. “God, it’s like I’m seeing this city for the very first time.” He finds my eyes again: “It’s like I’m seeing a lot of things for the very first time.”

  The crowd has started cheering, counting down, jumping and throbbing and clamoring for midnight, the start of something new, the promise of beginnings.

  “Me too,” I say.

  “I see you,” he says.

  “I see you too,” I say, and I do, and he does, and it’s as if he has a microscope inside of me.

  And then we are at three, and then we are at two, and then we are at one, and he is kissing me or maybe I am kissing him, but it doesn’t matter because the old year is behind us and a new one lies in wait, and I don’t worry about my mom and I don’t worry about my next part or my next paycheck or my mom’s next scan. Thousands of pieces of sparkling confetti rain down, mixing with the snow, and I feel like I’m caught in time, caught in a perfect moment inside a snow globe that maybe I’d beg my mom for at a gas station, and I can’t find my breath, and my knees feel a little wobbly, and I try to remind myself to remember this moment, to hold on to it forever, to seal it up like we really are in that snow globe and to never let anything shatter the bubble that envelops us, that protects us from everything else around us in the outside world.

  5

  BEN

  AUGUST 2014

  Jesus, somehow I turned forty. Am turning forty. Tomorrow.

  I let the hot water from the shower pulse against my face and neck for too long, and by the time I flip the shower handle to off, my skin is pink and a little angry. I grab one of the white towels hanging on the pewter hooks and knot it around my waist, then stare at the full-length mirror in the bathroom that is half packed because we’re moving next week. Tatum needs a house with better security; Tatum needs a house that moves us one more step toward isolation. We’re stuck in this bubble that is entirely our creation, and it feels as if there’s no way out, no room to breathe.

  I blame her for this.

  I run my hand over my stubble, meet my eyes in the mirror. It’s an unkind thought, and I chastise myself for it. She loves this house, loves the family we built here, though now that family is tenuous at best, though we are doing an excellent job at pretending that we’re not falling apart—both to each other and to the various media outlets who occasionally sniff at some unhappiness but mostly paint her (and us) as something out of a blissful, stylized magazine spread.

  We both—equally—loved this home in Holmby Hills that had seen us through so much. But a month ago we’d woken up to her stalker staring at our family photographs on our living room fireplace mantel, and after she hid in the closet and I called the police, we both knew that the house was just another thing we had to let go of, like anonymity, like a normal life where we (she) kept sane hours and caught up on our days over dinner and grew a vegetable patch out back and greeted tiny trick-or-treaters come Halloween. None of that is who we are anymore, not with Tatum’s fame and the bubble that it’s forced us into. The new place in Brentwood has a ten-foot wall in a gated community and is impenetrable, literally. A large Israeli man with a Bluetooth earpiece and a holster on his hip walked us through the security system and explained the ins and outs, explained how we were safer there than at the White House. (I was dubious, but we’d only been to the White House once—Tatum was invited for a press dinner. I was literally patted down in my tux twice and screened through four metal detectors, but what did I know?) We talk about getting a guard dog; Monster is old and slow, and besides, he’d befriend anyone who gave him a treat, threw him a literal bone. We talk about round-the-clock bodyguards, though I point out that the large Israeli man told us we were already safe.

  “Hey.” Tatum pops her head around the bathroom doorway. “You almost ready or are you too busy admiring yourself in the mirror? You’re an old man now, come on.”

  “I’m looking good for forty.” I grin, and suck in my stomach, show her my profile.

  She sighs.

  “Or not? I don’t know.” I let my stomach deflate.

  “No, you do, you are. I just . . . I got my period. Maybe we’re just too old.”

  “You’re not forty, just me,” I remind her.

  We’d started trying for another child about nine months ago, last year, right around when Piper was pregnant. In fact, Tatum had sprung the news on me that she wanted another one when we were back in Ohio for Piper’s baby shower. I figured it was the excitement and the nostalgia: the little onesies, the cute stuffed animals and music boxes. We’d always been fine with one, with Joey. We’d agreed on that—one. Tatum barely had time to fit Joey in her schedule, much less me. But she announced it with such authority and such conviction that I couldn�
��t even question it: “I think we should have another baby, and I’ve already made time for it in my schedule, so I think it should work and let’s just do it.” I’d just gotten home from a run through her old neighborhood; I remember peeling off my shirt and Tatum lingering in the bathroom, as if she were issuing a press statement: We’re going to have another baby. Not phrased as a question, not tossed out as a possibility.

  I started to say, You’ve already lost track of me. Will I be pushed out entirely when a new one comes along? But it felt needy and jealous and a little childish too. Also, I had the weight of my guilt sinking me down, all of the ways, both big and small, I’d betrayed her over the past two years, so I nodded, flipped on the shower, and said: “OK.”

  I was happy with one, with Joey. Tatum needed more. I took it personally, until I remembered that I’d needed something more too, and Tatum had no idea. There are a lot of reasons that you say yes to something you don’t really want. Guilt worked perfectly well for me. Besides, Leo had been everything to me; I could understand wanting to give Joey a sibling.

  “We can try again next month,” I say to her now, in the half-packed bathroom. Though the idea of rising with a screaming infant at three a.m. felt less palatable with every passing month. At forty, my own dad had a fifteen-year-old and an eight-year-old: he had the energy for us, but barely. A newborn? It sounds exhausting already. “Don’t worry,” I repeat. “We’ll try again.”

  I don’t know when I stopped telling Tatum my truths. She used to read everything about me, see through me. Maybe I stopped telling her my truths as a challenge, to see if she still could.

  “I’m away next month. Vancouver, remember?”

  I don’t remember but I say: “Oh, right.” I don’t ask why or what for. There’s a giant master calendar in the kitchen that I can consult if I need to know where to find her on a certain day. Her assistant uses color coding to make it easier: red for on set, blue for media, green for meetings, orange for Joey. I don’t get a marker. It’s assumed, I guess, that I can write in my own commitments to fit around hers. Actually, maybe that was when I stopped telling her my truths. When a giant master calendar went up, and there wasn’t a marker for me.

  “Then the following month,” I offer.

  She shrugs. “OK, hurry up. We have a reservation.”

  “Down in ten. When you’re this good-looking, it doesn’t take much.” I wink, try to make her laugh.

  “Ha,” she says on her way out the door.

  I reassess myself in the mirror. Though I don’t want a newborn, I could manage. I am a younger forty than my dad was at the same age, though he rose most mornings to play racquetball, out the door before our nanny had even made us breakfast. I’m a more involved father too: a field trip in May to go berry picking (I was the only dad); coaching peewee soccer last fall; midnight trips into Joey’s room when he has a bad dream.

  For my dad’s fortieth, we took a family trip to Paris. I remember it because he had just wrapped a monster trial, which meant that I saw him even less than usual, and my mom kept telling us: We’ll all have time together on this trip! If she minded my dad’s absence, she didn’t complain; she doted on him when he was around, brought him tea, made his favorite dinners. When he wasn’t, she was busy as the president of Dalton’s PTA, as chair of one charity committee or the other. We flew to Paris first-class, and Leo, still cute and impish at eight, charmed the flight attendants into giving him all the leftover chocolate. My dad spent most of the flight quizzing me on my French (I was in honors) and then reading briefs for work upon his return. But Leo, hopped up on all the chocolate, was nearly vibrating, and he scaled the seat and somersaulted into the lap of the Frenchman behind him, who was none too pleased, and then quickly turned irate when Leo knocked the man’s coffee into his lap.

  My dad, who had just started wearing reading glasses, pushed them higher on his nose and said: “Ben, apologize in French to him. Make nice. Sort it out.”

  My mom was asleep from her two glasses of wine. My dad’s own French had been honed at Yale; he could speak it better than I could, and after all, he was the parent. But I did as I was asked, partially because I wanted to impress him, partially because it wasn’t phrased as a question.

  Once I had apologized in my mostly fluent French and had Leo strapped back into his seat and had pulled out some crayons and a coloring book my mom had stowed in his backpack, my dad looked over from across the aisle and said, “Nice job, Ben,” and then returned to his briefs.

  It wasn’t a big deal, it wasn’t such a life-altering incident. But it was profound in its own way. That my dad sent the message that I was Leo’s keeper just as much as he was. That he also conveyed that I was the responsible son, that I was literally there to clean up Leo’s messes. I resented my dad for that. I remember stewing over it, staring out the window somewhere over the Atlantic and thinking: Why did I have to talk down that French guy who was shouting about sending “enfants” to the back of the plane, while you acted like your briefs were more important? But later in the trip, when we were touring the Louvre, I found myself showing off for my father, conversing with our tour guide as often as possible, asking questions I really didn’t even care about because I wanted my father to look over once more and say simply: “Nice work.”

  I thought about that for a long time afterward. How complicated approval and resentment can be, how they can be tied together so closely that you might mistake one for the other if you’re not careful.

  My eyes falter in my bathroom mirror, as my phone buzzes on the vanity counter.

  Happy birthday tomorrow. I wanted to be the first to wish you.

  Then another buzz.

  Sorry. Shit. I wish I hadn’t sent that. You don’t have to write me back. Or do if you want?

  Instinctively, I grab my phone and start typing until my brain tells my fingers to slow down. They’re shaking with adrenaline, so I’d have to delete most of what I wrote anyway. I delete it all. Rest my phone back on the marble, then swipe it back up and throw it into the bottom cabinet drawer. As if that can stop the temptation of starting back up with Amanda, when I’d been so resolute since I cut things off last December, eight months now.

  I ended it only when I found a draft of an e-mail to Tatum’s publicist, asking how she would plan a strategy for divorce. We were trying for the baby, but Tatum had always been one to have a backup plan. I read the e-mail to Luann—How would you position this so people know I tried my hardest to make it work—and something came undone in me: that while I’d been toying with Amanda, maybe seriously, but maybe not, Tatum was toying with a whole other life without me too. Amanda had been an escape. Tatum, it turned out, had one too. I’d closed out of her in-box and run to the bathroom and nearly shit myself. Literally. I’d been such a stupid, stupid fuck.

  I have to remind myself of this every time Amanda texts, every time Tatum is dismissive of me, every time she doesn’t even think to give me my own marker on our enormous calendar, or when she announces that we’re going to try for another kid and doesn’t expect to be challenged because she has a team of people who surround her now, wrap her in bubble wrap, to ensure that she is protected.

  But after the e-mail calamity, I met Amanda in a Starbucks near Cedars. “We have to stop doing this,” I said simply. “I’d rather cut off a limb, but I have to.” Neither of us believed that to be true.

  It was raining that day, and her flame-red hair was matted and damp, and she reminded me of how Monster sometimes looks: like he still needed to be rescued even after we took him in all those years ago. But as she batted her eyes, fighting back tears, it occurred to me that I’d misplaced my own rescue operation, that I’d been reckless and gotten high off the thrill of us, but I was the one who actually needed to be saved. There is nostalgia for an ex, and there is crossing a line to entertain that nostalgia. That’s not love; that’s not worth risking your life over.

  Fuck.

  I’d screwed things up so badly, and it was all
I could do to try to right myself, ourselves, before Tatum ever caught wind of it. It was the first time it had occurred to me, not in an impish, thrilling way, but a deep-in-my-guts way, that Tatum could find out and leave me.

  “I’m sorry,” I’d said. “I’ll miss you.”

  I drove home, my windshield wipers flapping too quickly, and realized I was no different from Walter, with his alcoholism and years of unkept promises, and no different from Leo, with all of his demons and screw-ups. We all have that shiny carrot we chase when we know it could be poisonous. We all step too close to the flame because we wonder how much it would hurt if we get burned.

  I’d felt forgotten, overlooked by my own wife, when loyalty was what I’d always wanted. And so I found a way to be seen, found a way to trump her passive disloyalty with my own. That doesn’t make it forgivable, it doesn’t mean I excuse it. But that’s what it was, is, all the same.

  I reach for my phone from the bottom cabinet drawer. I knew it would do me no good, stuffing it there. Amanda had proven devoted, as if she’d learned a lesson from the years that separated us, and now she was mine if I wanted her.

  It was more than that, of course, for me. It was the wistfulness, the pining for being young and unburdened, for a different partner, different breasts and legs and lips. She was an easy escape, a sure thing, when my wife was gone so often, returning home in mercurial moods, with mercurial haircuts, with mercurial wishes that I didn’t often understand. Partially because I stopped asking. Partially because she stopped telling me.

  I turn to the side and suck in my stomach again, watching it fall and rise in the mirror, amazed that this body of mine has been on this planet for forty years now, aware of how lucky I am to be alive. How fucking miraculous it is that any of us gets to be here another day.

  I pick up my phone. Set it down. Pick it up again.

  It’s ok, I type. I miss you too. But I still can’t.

  All true.

  “Ben!” Tatum’s voice reverberates up the stairwell, echoes through the now mostly empty rooms, primed and ready for the movers. “My dad’s here!”